Search This Blog

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

NASA New Camera Gives Scientists an EPIC Perspective of Earth

New NASA Camera

Gives Scientists an EPIC Perspective

of Earth

On March 9, 2016, EPIC captured a powerful series of images of Earth during a solar eclipse. The eclipse was viewed by the DSCOVR spacecraft located 1.5 million km from Earth. The eclipse appears as a dark circle surrounded by a brighter disk. The image of the eclipse moves across Earth as it rotates.

The Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) connected to NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is NASA’s new tool to provide scientists with a unique perspective of the Earth’s clouds, land surfaces, and aerosols. EPIC captures measurements in visible, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths, and collects color images of the Earth every two hours. Researchers use these photos to track identifying features as the planet rotates.

Jay Herman, senior research scientist at UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET) and the EPIC instrument lead investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, explains that ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelengths allow him to watch as dust from the Sahara Desert travels west across the Atlantic Ocean, for example. “It’s the only view we have like this where everything is at the exact same instant in time, even though the local times are different,” he says.

Earth rotates through an entire day as captured in this animation of 22 still images taken on Sept. 17, 2015 by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft.Credits: NASA

Other satellite instruments in orbit can pick up this data at fixed local times, but EPIC provides day-long views of this process. “We can see the progression in real time, as it flows across the Atlantic,” Herman adds.

The results from the first EPIC images were shared at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco on Monday, December 14.